National Environmental Disaster

In addition to the massive exploitation of workers which so often goes hand in hand with the country’s mining activity, we must consider the ongoing environmental devastation in areas where minerals and metals are extracted or processed. This unregulated exploitation of natural resources is specifically due to the lack of government policies and regulations which should be in place to force mining and metalwork companies to comply with the conservation of water, soil, subsoil, forests, atmosphere, plantations, reedbeds, and pastures where biodiversity is being destroyed.

The activity of some mining and metalwork companies which act without social responsibility, especially the most powerful among them, is closely linked with the irremediable damage done to ecosystems in mining areas. And if the companies very often do not offer basic conditions of security, industrial hygiene and health to their own workers, they care even less about protecting the environment. The fact is that, according to INEGI, the National Institute for Statistics and Geography, environmental damage costs the country 8 per cent of its gross domestic product.

We don’t have to go very far to see who is the principal culprit of this enormous environmental destruction. It is the federal government, for whom this is another failure on the list that it has been visibly accumulating in the two six-year terms of PAN (National Action Party) politics. The pillaging of the environment in mines and nearby areas is yet another the product of short-sighted unilateral policymaking which only serves the interests of one sector: the mining companies. It is evident that the system is broken because the government never consults the people who live in villages surrounding the mining areas about the inevitable damage to the local environment when it is handing out mining concessions to either Mexican or foreign companies. Above all when water supplies are abused in production processes and the cleaning of extracted material, contaminating it with cyanide and other chemical products, leaving communities without this basic resource. The government is at best criminally absent in this sphere, at worst complicit with and submissive to mining companies, from the moment the Ministry of the Economy gives mining land to the companies, without defining their limits or ensuring that companies have previously put in place stringent, binding promises to respect and preserve the environment. The search for profits determines the actions of businesses and government. Once more, ignorance and greed are put at the service of personal interests.

Under the two conservative governments which have been in power since 2000, mining concessions have been freely handed out, to such an extent that the two PAN administrations have given 26 per cent of the national territory to Mexican and foreign-backed companies, and in recent years they have approved 757 foreign projects for mining extraction. This means that they have given mining groups approximately 56 million hectares of a total area of 200 million hectares over the whole country. The government gives a select few Mexican mining and metalwork companies concessions that are scandalously damaging to national interests, as in the case of Germán Larrea’s Grupo México, which was recently awarded over 400 concessions, each one with over 15 thousand hectares, as well as the unconstitutional gratuity of the ability to exploit the methane gas which is released from coal mines. This was happening at the time of the industrial homicide at Pasta de Conchos in February 2006, which was this company’s direct responsibility. None of these concessions has involved any serious environmental protection commitment, much less any respect for labour and human rights; no environmental protection went any further than being a written intention that was difficult to verify or never evaluated.

This has led communities in mining areas to protest bravely against environmental devastation, for reasons of simple survival or with regard to indigenous peoples’ demand that their sacred areas be respected. The list of communities that have reacted against this situation is long, but the government gives them no way of voicing their concerns and no solution. As such we see how the mining company backed by Canadian capital, Minera San Xavier, which extracts gold and other minerals, has devastated San Pedro hill in San Luis Potosí, with the complicit support of federal and state governors, and where the participation of the ex-President Vicente Fox and his wife Martha Sahagún have been denounced as among the beneficiaries of this destruction, despite the protests of local people and a large sector of civil society. Similarly, faced with the endless stream of environmental violations, the federal government, as well as the governments of almost all the 26 states where there is mining activity, do no more than give vague promises and protracted explanations of the underlying problems. But then, instead of dealing with those problems, the use state security forces to crush community protests, just as they do with the labour demands of mine workers.

This is an incredibly serious emergency situation which should be placed at the top of the list of national priorities for the near future. The way mining concessions are managed is completely idiotic and suicidal, and ignores environmental protection and conservation. Mexico needs radical, firm policies against the squandering of non-renewable natural resources.